Abstract:
In this thesis I will argue that an ecofeminist imaginary has been producing narratives in
English women’s writing since the late seventeenth century and continues in the work of
contemporary Australian writer, Inga Simpson. For centuries this imaginary has
developed insight into how the entrenched patriarchal system has devalued women,
nature and other Others. A brief historical overview discusses four connected areas: first,
that an ecofeminist imaginary exists; secondly, that it is represented in the writing and
literature of/by English women before and during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries; thirdly, that it complicated the culturally acceptable notions of women and/in
nature; fourthly, that it made possible new forms of narration for women. These modes
of writing about the natural world were transported by early White settler women to
Australia, where certain entrenched approaches to nature were perpetuated in aid of the
colonial project and resulted in colonial anxieties such as the lost child. A unique
historical perspective is provided by linking the English proto-ecofeminist writing to
Inga Simpson’s novel Nest. Simpson’s writing invites us to re-examine our own
relationship with the nonhuman both in our contemporary actions and our relationship
to the histories that have produced it. In her narrating of protagonist Jen’s connection to
the surrounding bush and its more-than-human life forms she creates a transontological
space in order to narrate the results of human incursion and to suggest ways of
mitigation through a non-dominative action and language. Simpson’s work rests in the
continuum of the ecofeminist imaginary, demonstrating how it has been produced over
time, from what it is constituted, and how it has been sustained.
